Online Copywriting: How to Write Persuasive Product Pages

1. About this Class: Selling a product online is vastly different from selling a product offline in three ways. First, the sales process starts long before the buyer lens on your product page. Second, potential customers can't pick up your product or touch it or try it on for size. And third, potential customers can't talk to a salesperson before they Biden, not the way they can in a store anyway. To meet these three challenges, you need to start selling on Google. You need to write copy on your product pages knowing that this copy will show up in search results, you need to write product descriptions that work with product images and choose product images that work with your copy. And you need to anticipate the most common and pressing objections and questions that your potential buyers have. And then you need to meet these head on in your copy. Welcome to my course, online copywriting, how to write persuasive product pages. I'm your instructor, Alan sharp. I've been writing copy since 1989. I've written in all the channels offline, online, outdoor, mobile radio, television, video, and social. This course teaches you how to write copy that sells products online. It's an online copywriting course packed with tips on how to write compelling copy for shopping carts and online store pages. This course is divided into ten lessons. Lesson 1 is all about why your sales pitch starts on Google. Most buyers visit Google before they visit your online store. So if you want your product page to generate sales, you need to write it for the search engines. And I show you how Lesson 2 is about navigation and how to write copy that helps your potential customers find your product pages. Most product pages are buried a few levels deep on websites, I show you how to help your potential buyers find the product pages they're looking for. Lesson 3 is about the title tag on your product page. Title tags are a major factor in helping search engines and your customers understand if your product page is relevant to them. Lesson 4 is about your product page description tag. If you want to increase the number of people who visit your online product page, you must write a compelling description tag. In lesson 5, we look at URLs and navigation. The sounds pretty dull. But your URL and your navigation are two of the most important things you have to think about and get right. When you're writing your product pages. Lesson 6, you discover why a product picture is never worth a thousand words. And this lesson is all about product images and other visuals. How to choose them, and how to write copy that works with those visuals. One of the secrets to success in selling products online is offers. And in less than seven, I described seven offers to include in your online store and how to write captivating copy for each one. In Lesson eight, we look at upsells. Upsells that improve your customers online shopping experience. And upsells that at the same time generate more revenue for you. Lesson 9 is all about mastering the short product description. Your product description can make or break a sale. It's one of the most important pieces of copy on your website. Less than 10 is the final lesson. In this course, we look at how to write long product descriptions. I give you five tips on how to ace this part of your product page. Every one of these lessons is filled with practical step-by-step advice. I gave you the tools that tips the tricks that I've learned over the decades as a copywriter, I use dozens of examples from the real-world of online product pages and shopping carts. I describe what works, what doesn't work, and why. And I give you lots of examples. I designed this course for intermediate copywriters who need to write online product pages that convert visitors into buyers. In other words, copywriters who needs to write copy that sells products online. 2. Start selling on page one of Google: One of the big differences between a bricks and mortar store and an online store is where you meet the salesperson. In the offline world, you decide you need to buy something, let's say a coffee table. You think about the stores in your city that carry coffee tables, and you decide which one you're going to visit. The climate changes your car. You drive to the store. You drive around and around the car park until you find a spot. You park and you walk into the store. If the store is a department store, the first thing you do is look for a store directory so you can head to the right floor in the store where the coffee tables are sold. If the store is a specialty retailer or a store on one floor like Walmart, you look for signage that tells you where the furniture is. As you get closer to that section of the storage or walking, you look for the area where the living room furniture is on display. And as you walk into that section, you look for the coffee tables. Here is where you meet the salesperson, not at home, not on the drive to the store. Not as you walk into the store, not as you look at the store directory. Only when you find the part of the store that has the coffee tables here. And only here is where you hear those immortal words. May I help you and your reply? Of course, No, thanks. I'm just looking online. Your shopping experience is vastly different. You decide you need to buy something, let's say a coffee table. You boot up your computer or your tablet or your smart phone, and you visit a search engine. Google, for example, you type in a search term, something like coffee tables upcoming the results on the search page. Google assumes you are looking to buy a coffee table. And so it serves up a long list of online retailers who sell coffee tables. It also assumes you might not know what a coffee table is. So it displays a definition from Wikipedia. Helpful, right? This is where you meet your first salesperson. Actually you make 20 salespeople on this page of search results, 20 salespeople are trying to get you to visit their store. The guy from struck tube wants you to visit his online store. Look, he says, but go to coffee table, natural, the Galliform furniture dot ca. Once you to visit store, Hey, look at this Ellis rolling coffee table. She says it's $959. I don't think so. Same goes for the salespeople at ikea, Wayfair could GG Leon's. And on down the page, they're all saying something to grab your attention. In the world of online retail copywriting, this is where your job starts, not on your stores homepage, not on the product page, but here on page 1 of the search results for what you are selling. This is where you first meet your potential customer. This is where you make your first pitch for their business. This is where your job starts as an online retail copywriter. Let's start with the paid results at the top of the page. These two search results are paid ads, one for ikea and one for Wayfair. The first thing you need to do with an online ad is demonstrate relevance. You do this by showing the potential buyer that you have, what they are looking for. In our example, we are looking to buy a coffee table. So these two keywords must appear. Your add coffee table. Put the keywords you're targeting in the first few words of your ad. Google gives your 20 characters before the hyphen and another 20 characters after the hyphen. Notice that both advertisers have also put these keywords in the URL in the website address. That further demonstrates relevance. The second thing you must do is give your potential customer a reason to click your ad and visit your store. Of these two ads, Wayfair gets it right and ikea gets it wrong. Shop at Wayfair and you'll save up to 70 percent. Saving money is a benefit. They also offer two-day shipping, free shipping. That's two benefits. And they do it in two days, that speed, and it's free that savings. Notice that Wayfair even offers the free shipping in their URL. That's a smart move. Ikea, on the other hand, simply tells you what they are selling. Glass and wood Coffee Tables, many shapes and sizes, That's it. They do not give you a single reason to click their ad and visit their store. The third thing you must do with a paid ad is take your potential buyer to the right place in your online store. Click the Wayfair ad and you arrive at the part of their online store that has their coffee tables. The breadcrumb navigation confirms this to you, and so does the category header. You're in the coffee table section of the store, But do the same thing with the ikea add. And you arrive at the part of their store that displays their coffee tables and side table. The breadcrumb navigation confirms this and so does the category header. You are in the coffee table section of the store. This is vital when you write an ad for a category of products like coffee tables. Don't direct your buyers to your homepage or the furniture page in general, or even the living room furniture page, direct them to the category they are looking for. Now let's look at organic results. The organic results are the ones that the search engine believes are most relevant to you. The ones that most closely match what it is that you're searching for. You'll notice that Google things, two things are relevant to me in this particular example, what I'm looking for and where I live. Notice that all of the search results have the key phrase, coffee table in them. That's because the words coffee table or in the title of each page. If you want your product to appear in search results, you must put the name of the product or the product category in the title of your product page. And notice that Plenty of the results are for Canadian retailers in general and retailers in my hometown of Kitchener in particular. Next, notice that Google favors websites that have coffee table as a product category. The brick has a section of their store that is just Coffee Tales. So does loss means bad boy and surplus furniture. If you want, your product, will appear on the first page of search results. Arrange your store in a hierarchy like this, furniture, living room, coffee tools. Google and other search engines give more weight to websites that are organized this way. With organic search results like these, you have control of three things. The title of your page, which appears here in the search results, the website address or the URL, including the domain hierarchy, which appears here, and the description metatag of the webpage which appears here. These are the three areas of your product page that you must spend the most time on in order to get your product page or your product category to show up in search results. Remember, the two main things you must do, our show relevance and give your potential buyers or reason to click the link to your product. You show relevance by putting the keywords that the person is searching for into these three areas of your page. And you give buyers a reason to visit your page by giving them benefits. Look through these search results and you see that these online retailers stress different features and benefits. Here they are in order. Coffee tables and I can purchase locally in my hometown coffee tables that are new or used. Coffee tables that are stylish, affordable, varying shapes and sizes and colors. Copy to coffee. Coffee tables that are made from different materials, including glass and metal. Coffee tables that are rustic or modern. Coffee tables that are shipped free of charge. Coffee tables that you can buy in installments, Coffee Tables that nest coffee tables with drawers. You get the idea, that's just from one page of results. And as you can see, that's a lot of features and a lot of benefits. Your first job as an online retail copywriter is to discover what your buyers want, what they are looking for. Then capture those things in the page title, the URL, and the description sections of your product page. When you get these things right, your product pages appear on the first page of search results and potential buyers. Click the link that takes them to your store. 3. Boost sales with better navigation: Before you can sell anything to anyone with a product page on your website, you need to attract potential buyers to that product page. There are three ways that prospects will find your product page online. They are the conductor, search for your product and find your page in the search results that click the link and arrive at your product page. Or they click on a banner ad or a Facebook ad or a text link somewhere else on the Internet. And they arrive at your product page, or they visit your online store and they either browse or search until they find the product page they are looking for. In this lesson, you and I are looking at the last method. We're looking at how we have to write the copy that helps our potential customers find our product pages. We are looking at navigation. Let's start with the homepage. Since that's where most shoppers begin their shopping on your website. One way to direct buyers to your product page is with a banner ad. This is the homepage for Argos or retailer in the United Kingdom. As you can see, they are promoting toys on their homepage. That's because I created this lesson in December during the buying season that leads up to Christmas. And toys are a popular gift to buy and give a Christmas time. The secret to writing an effective banner ad is relevance and benefits. This means you must name what you are promoting and you must give your prospect an incentive or a reason for clicking on the banner ad. And you can see Argos names, what they're selling toys. As you can see, they are having a sale. Let's read the copy. Toy spectacular plus R 15 million pound clearance. And so much more, even more prices dropped. This copywriter has the right idea, but the copy is lousy. With banner ads. Actually with all online copy, you must tell a graph you're meeting immediately. That means you must use as few words as possible and you must be direct. Toy spectacular is oblique, saying toy sale is direct, calling it a 15, $1 million clearance is obscure for one thing, it it focuses on what the retailer is doing and not on what the buyer is going to get. It says, we are having a clearance. Instead of saying you save money. Even more prices dropped is also indirect. This Banner would be a lot more powerful and effective if it said toy sale, save money on hundreds of discounted toys while they last. The next way to point buyers to your product page is to feature your product categories on your homepage. This is the homepage for Dell, the computer manufacturer. They list their six most popular product categories right? On the homepage. They do this with an image and with a keyword, but he's the image. Let's say you're looking to buy a monitor. You click on the image for monitors and up pops and navigation tree that asks you where you are going to be using your monitor at home or at work. You make your choice and you immediately arrive at the page. For monitors. The thing to remember here is that you must call the product category. What your buyer's call the product category. You must get into the mind of your potential customer and think the way that they think and speak the way that they speak. This example is straightforward because your potential buyer is looking for a monitor. And so your image should be of a monitor and the word you use to name the category should be monitor. Checkout, the homepage of sharper image. They know that their potential customers arrive at their site. Not always knowing what they want to buy. All they know is that they are buying something for someone as a gift. And this is why sharper image has two rows of navigation, a top row navigation for people who do know what they're looking for. And the bottom row of navigation for people who don't know what they're looking for, but they know that it's for a certain someone's such as a woman, a man, or a child. While we are here on the sharper image site, let's talk about category and subcategory pages. When you are directing your potential buyers to your product pages, you also have to consider the copy you are going to use on the category and subcategory pages that lead your buyers to where they want to go. As you can see with sharper image, every product they sell is part of a category and usually part of a subcategory as well. Consider electric shavers for men, for example. You find those by looking under personal care. Here at the top of the page, you see the product category named. And beneath the category is a block of body copy that sells you on the category. Quote, Let's sharper image, provide you with all the personal care products you need to improve your lifestyle. We have many different grooming tools, massage parlors, sleep solutions. And beautification essentials. Looking for a gift for him. Why not the fatherless shower mirror or if you need a special gift for her, checkout the foot and leg spot. Take care of yourself and sharpen your image unquote. Most buyers will not read all of this copy, but the search engines will notice how the copy names some of the subcategories in this category, such as grooming tools, massages, and sleep solutions wherever they are. Not all, not all shopping carts have this feature where you can write a block of copy for each product category and subcategory. But if your shopping cart does use this feature, write a paragraph that names the subcategories and products within the category, give your potential buyers a reason to stay on the page and the search engines or reason to index your page. The best way to find out what to write in this section is to do keyword research for the product category. This category is men's electric shavers. Do your keyword research and you discover what buyers are searching for. Take those keywords and incorporate them into the body copy that describes the product category. For example, on this sharper image page for men's personal care products, you would say sharper image has the best electric shavers for sensitive skin. By the way, if I was writing this copy, I'd use hyperlinks for the subcategories and products that they mentioned. The word massage chairs, for example, should be a link that takes you to the massage subcategory page. Same goes for the fatherless shower mirror. It's a product. There should be a link. You should be able to click on that word to take you to that page. Search engines follow links, the index, your website. The more relevant your links are, the higher you'll place in search engine results. Let's talk about subcategories. As you can see, this personal care category has a subcategory of men's care. Since we're looking for a men shaver, will click on there. Now we're on the subcategory page for men's care. You see the subcategory named at the top of the page and another block of copy here is where you name the products that are in the sub categories such as fog free, shower mirrors and de-luxe nose and ear trimmers. On the sharper image store. This is as deep as the categories go, which is unfortunate because as you can see, there is no sub, sub category for shavers. Look at the images and you see that the shavers are mixed in among all the other personal care products. For men. Someone looking for a shaver and only a shaper wants to find all the shavers on one page. Another disadvantage of the shopping cart is that it does not feature breadcrumb navigation. Visit Walmart and go through this same exercise, looking for a shaver and you find yourself in a much better organized shopping cart, one that features breadcrumb navigation that shows you where you are in the store. And that helps you move from category page to category page by clicking on those words in the breadcrumb navigation. A better shopping cart experience would organize the pages like this. Personal care men's care shavers with a block of copy for each category filled with keywords to boost SEO and help buyers find what they're looking for. In the world of online retail copywriting, half the battle is directing and navigating and steering your buyer to your product page. If you remember that, you'll sell more online. 4. Product page title tags: When you sit down to write copy for a product page on our website, one of the most important things you need to get right is the page title, also called the title tag. The title tag is an HTML element that's found at the beginning. The HTML, it looks like this. It needs to be an accurate and short description of what a page is all about. Title tags appear in two places in the title of the page like this. And in search engine results as the clickable headline for a given search result. Your page title is important for usability, for search engine optimization and for social sharing. Title tags are a major factor in helping search engines understand what your product page is about. And because they show up in search results, they are the first impression that potential buyers have of your product page. Here's how you write the title tag for your product page. First, don't think of writing a grammatically correct sentence because you don't have to. All you need to do is write a phrase that contains the right keywords. One format uses this order, primary keyword, secondary keyword store name. For example, let's say your product pages selling fishing rods and you're selling the Berkeley lightning rod spinning rod in particular, you start with the primary keyword, which in this case is the product name, Berkeley lightening rod, spinning rod. Then you add a space, a vertical bar, and another space. Then you type the secondary keyword, which is fishing rods. You add a space, a vertical bar, and another space. Then you type the store name, bass pro shops. Your product page title looks like this. Primary keyword, secondary keyword, store name. It shows up in search results like this. The store name in this example is a retailer. If the shopping cart was on the manufacturer's site than the manufacturer's name would go at the end of the title. Here's another example is from a product page on the website for Aldo shoes. It starts with the name of the shoe, then the type of shoe followed by the brand name. Although this page title is perfect because it describes the page perfectly and it's optimized for search engines all in just 45 characters. The key thing to understand here is that you are putting both the product name and the category in the page title. You do this because this is how people search online for products. They typically start by searching for category. Later, they search for a product by name or by brand. Let's stick with our example of people who are online looking to buy shoes. Before you write your page title, you need to understand what people type into Google when they are looking for your product. So you do your research and you discover that people who are looking to buy your product typically start their search by typing men's running shoes into Google. Your first job is to create a category in your shopping cart using that keyword term, men's running shoes, a category page. Then you need to combine that category with your product name to create your page title. It will look something like this product name, product category in one phrase. Notice the format of the title. It includes the brand name, the model, and the category. If the brand name is not important, put it at the end of the title or leave it off the title description. Altogether. While we're on the topic of brand names, most potential customers eventually search by brand name and model name or modal number. For example, if they are searching for the aftermath snowboard, which is made by burden, they don't search for aftermath snowboard and they don't search for Burton snowboards. They search for Burton aftermath snowboard brand and then product name. Here's the next tip. Put your important keywords first. According to tests conducted by mas, keywords at the beginning of your title, improve search rankings. Research also shows that people scan just the first few words of a headline in a search result. This is why you must the unique thing about the page first. Typically, that is the product name. It's not the brand name, it's not the product category. So avoid titles like brand name, product category, name of product. Titles like this have too much repetitive information at the front. All the results for the shopping cart will all start with the same brand name. For example, plus, if you put the product name at the end of the title, some search engines may chop it off and not display it. Especially on smartphones, which have narrower screens than desktops. And laptops. By the way, don't spend Google by putting multiple variations of your keywords in your page title. Don't write something like best men's running shoes by running shoes for me, cheap men's runners. A title like this does not help your potential customers and it's likely to get you in trouble with Google. They will put your product page on page 159 of the search results where no one will find you, they'll penalize you for spamming them. The optimal length of your page title is 55 characters. Google typically displays the first 55 characters of a title tag. If you keep your titles under 55 characters, you can expect that at least 90 percent of your titles will display properly the full title. Look at these two search results for the same product. As you can see, the first title appears in full, while the second title is chopped off. Google tells you the title is incomplete by putting dot, dot, dot in the middle of the title. Another tip, consider putting a call to action in your title. Instead of simply saying Apple MacBook Pro Se by the Apple MacBook Pro. If your store offers the lowest prices, then put a call to action at the start of your titles, such as pay less for Apple, MacBook Pros. Naturally, putting a call to action at the start of your product page is going to push the title, the product name, and the other vital keywords further away from the start of the title, which is not advisable, but the call to action might boost your click-through rates. Test this tactic, and find out if it works for you. Another tip. Each product page on your website must have a unique title. Google penalizes websites and shopping carts that have multiple pages with the same title. Duplicate. Duplicate content is deadly to search engine optimization, so make sure all your titles are unique. Another thing to consider when naming your product pages is local SEO. Your product pays is advertising a product that can only be purchased from your bricks and mortar store. Or if you're bricks and mortar store offers lower prices than online stores do, which is unlikely. Then put your city in your product page title. If you sell Rolex watches, for example, and if your store is in Toronto, put those keywords in your page title. Someone's searching online for a Rolex sub Mariner in Toronto will find your page immediately. Some people search online but by locally. So if you need your website to generate foot traffic to your retail store, put your city name in your product page titles. Finally, think like your customer. Some online shoppers know exactly what they are searching for right down to the modal number or skew. This is especially true for folks who by parts online such as parts for cars and appliances. If you know that your potential customers will search for your product by its part number or skew, which is a stock keeping unit. Put those in your product title like this. When your page pops up in search results, your potential customers will see that you offer exactly what they are searching for and they will click on your link. That of course is true for all of your product page titles. Think like your potential customers. Discover what they search for, when they search for what you are selling. Discover the key words and phrases they use in their searches. Then put those keywords and phrases into your product page titles and see what happens. 5. Write description tags that attract buyers: One of the things to remember about selling products online is that the selling starts before the buyer visits your product page. The selling starts on Google. When someone searches for a product that you sell on your website, and when your store appears in search results, your potential buyers see a result like this, the title of the page, and a description. Google decides what appears in this description. If you have good copy in your meta description tag, Google will use that. But if your meta description tag is blank or if it contains duplicate content, google will take copy from somewhere else on your product page and use that. Here's an example of what I mean. The only purpose of this description in search results is to get potential buyers to click your link and visit your product page. In other words, Meta descriptions are there to generate click-throughs from search engines. Google lets you suggest what copy goes here In the description. The Meta description is a tag in HTML that summarizes the content of a webpage. Search engines typically display the meta-description in search results whenever the phrase that the user search for appears in the Meta description tag. The Meta description tag is something that customers don't see when they are on your product page. It is designed entirely for search engines. So writing the meta-description for your product pages is vital when you're right it well, you boost your ranking in search engine results and that leads to more clicks and those cliques lead to more sales. Just to be clear, Google and other search engines say there is no direct ranking benefit from the meta-description. They say that they don't use the description tag in their ranking algorithm. But the benefit of writing effective meta description tags, obvious. Google measures click-through rates to determine if your page is what searchers are looking for. If more people click your search result than Google moves you up in the search rankings. This is why optimizing the Meta description is so important. First of all, make your Meta descriptions under 160 characters long. Descriptions that are this length are shorter and they appear in search results in their entirety. If you write Meta descriptions that are longer, you take the risk that Google will skip your Meta description and random copy from somewhere else on your page. Chances are this text won't be interesting to your potential customers and so they won't click, that's a Google chooses the copy. The other problem with Meta descriptions that are too long is that Google truncates or description in search results. So your potential customers won't be able to read it. Anyway. Next, include your focus keyword. Every product page that you write has a focus keyword. Usually that focus keyword is the product name. The focus keyword is the primary keyword that you are targeting. For example, if your product page is selling the Canon EOS Rebel T6 DSLR than your focus keyword phrases, Canon EOS Rebel T6. Your secondary keyword is DSLR camera or Canon DSLR camera. The reason to include your primary keyword in your meta-description is to demonstrate relevance to search engines. If the primary keyword in your meta-description matches the keyword that your potential customer is using in a Google search, then Google will be more inclined to use your meta-description and highlight it in the search results that boosts your chances of getting clicks. Put your focus keywords at the front of your meta-description. You are writing for schemers, your potential buyers, skim results, looking for results that are relevant to what they're searching for. So grab their attention by putting your focus keywords at the start of your meta-description, not in the middle, and not at the end. Give your meta-description a call to action. Don't simply describe what's on your product page. Tell your potential buyers why they should click on your link and tell them what to do. Tell them about your free shipping, your free return policy, your money-back guarantee, any other information that make sure link more attractive and compelling than the other links in the search results. Here are some examples of what I mean. One of them simply describes the page. The other one tells you what to do and why. If you are selling a product that is defined by its specifications, then use structured content in your Meta description. Named them manufacturer, give them modal number, give the part number, give the skew. Match your meta-description to the content of your product page. Some shady online retailers try to trick Google by putting keywords in there, Meta descriptions that do not match what the retailer is selling on the product page. For example, some manufacturers will put the brand name or model name of a competing product in their meta-description. Hoping that doing so will fool Google into giving them a higher ranking in search results. The trouble is, Google is smart. Google spots this tactic and penalizes websites that use Meta descriptions that don't match the content of the product page. I imagine that you don't want to be penalized in search results. You don't want Google to penalize your webpages. So use Meta descriptions that match the content of your product pages. Right? Unique meta descriptions. Another thing that Google penalizes is duplicate content. If your meta-description is that duplicate for Meta descriptions found elsewhere on your site or elsewhere on the web. Google notices that and it reduces your ranking in search results. The quickest way to get penalized by Google is to use the product descriptions that are supplied by the manufacturer. There are two problems with manufacturers copy. First, lots of lazy store owners simply copy and paste this copy into their Meta descriptions. This leads to dozens or hundreds of product pages all across the web having duplicate content, try saying that quickly. Google penalizes you for that. And second, most promotional copies supplied by manufacturers is line. It's even terrible pool. Sometimes it isn't even grammatical. This copy does a lousy job of selling your product. So not only do the search engines, not like it, your potential customers don't find it appealing either and they skip your link in search results, they keep scrolling, they go somewhere else. So here's the rule. Always bright, unique meta descriptions. 6. Page URLS and navigation: This lesson is all about URLs and navigation on your e-commerce site. This may sound a little dull, but it's one of the most important things you have to think about when you're writing your product pages to sell stuff. Online. Descriptive URLs and navigation structures help customers navigate your site more easily. And Google loves a site that can understand quickly. In this lesson, I show you what you need to think about and write about to make sure your site is easy to navigate. Your URL is your website address or to be technical issue or Uniform Resource Locator. Think of your URL like your calling card that lets people know exactly what your site is about at it includes branding. But did you also know that your URL affects search engine optimization? Here's how having a good URL boosts your SEO. Reasons. Number 1, it improves your user experience. When you have keywords in your URL, everyone knows what your websites about. And that is end users and search engines included. Search engines understand what your websites about and that boosts your SEO and end users see your URL and they understand what you're about and they click to carefully crafted URLs that explains site content easily are great to. Instead of a forward slash and then a bunch of numbers, we can actually see what we're going to get when we click on the link. Imagine you're selling essential oils, for example. Which of these is a more compelling link for you to click on this one? Or this one. I think it's pretty clear to see that the second link is better. It's clearer. And both the end-user and the search engines will be much clearer on what it is that's being offered for sale. Reason number two, it can improve your rankings. Though the URLs don't carry massive weight in search engine rankings. They do have some influence, including a keyword that you're trying to rank for in your URL can help reason three, link clicks and anchor text. Imagine that you see these two links online. Let's think of this as link a. And let's think of this as link B. Which one are you more likely to click on link a or link be? Blink be of course, because you can see exactly what you're getting from the URL. This is known as a semantically accurate URL. Posting links like link a on Facebook forums, blog comments and other places isn't going to get you far. People just won't click on them. But links like link B will garner more clicks and will serve as their own anchor text. So again, it's win, win. Now, once you've got your URL, right, your navigation labels. Navigation labels appear in both your URL and on your site itself. Think of navigation labels like signage above the aisles in a bricks and mortar store. Checkout flora Copia, for example. Their navigation labels for their online store, our essential oils, flower essences, body and skin care, and hubs. When you're using navigation labels, think carefully about how your customers shop. Don't just divide your products into arbitrary categories. For example, it makes little sense in an active wear store to make navigation labels based on color. Let's say your website cells active where your navigation labels will be hiking, winter sports, water sports, ball sports, working out, and so on. When you're creating your navigation labels, think of the keywords you're targeting with your site. Incorporate those keywords into your navigation labels wherever possible without affecting usability. For example, if you're a designer clothing store and you found people search for designer shoes, then create a navigation label that says just that instead of shoes, says designer shoes. This helps search engines pull up your site when people enter that search term, when they're looking for something to buy. Take a look at millet mountain. Their main categories across the top are men, women, and hardware. If you hover over any of these, you find many other categories. Some of these are targeted to keywords. For example, someone's searching for Gore-Tex boots or climbing shoes will find this website high up on search results because these keyword terms are included in the navigation labels. When creating your navigation, look at product categories. Sure, you've categorized by some main features, but you can go even deeper into this. For example, let's say you're running a kitchen goods store. You'll have created your navigation labels based on product type. For example, you'll have kettles, will be under one label, ovens under another one, dishwashers and so on. But you also might divide these products by brand as well. For example, you can have the options on your site of shop by product type or shop by brand. Again, dive into keyword research for this. If people are searching for Whirlpool refrigerators and you stock them, then making this a product category helps both your users and the search engines find what they're looking for. Thinking about the different ways that people approach your online store. What are they looking for? What are their requirements? Are they thinking about colors, seasons, brand names, engine sizes, product types, price, points, whichever factors are relevant in their choosing process. Include them in your navigation as product categories whenever possible. But remember, keep the most relevant category for your main navigation labels on your homepage. To boost SEO, further write a general description in each of your product categories. So let's say you sell beauty products. Someone who's looking for hair conditioner. So they click on that navigation label and are taken to a page of hair conditioner products to choose from. To get visibility for this navigation page on search engines, target keywords in four ways. To use a keyword on the title page like this. Look at the red boxes showing how they used the term kids hair care. In the page title. Tip number 2, use the keyword in the heading of the page like this. The red box highlights the keyword in the heading of the page. Again, kids hair care. Tip three. Use the keywords in a paragraph at the top of the navigation page, right around 200 words and include the keyword a few times as long as it flows naturally. And grammatically. This has the effect of turning the navigation page into a landing page. Search engines will find the page based on the keyword usage and they'll bring customers right onto that page from their search. You'll notice bunnies doesn't have a paragraph at the top of the navigation page. So I'll show you a different example. The red highlighted portion of this page is a paragraph at the top of the navigation page for E liquids. It includes the keywords of E liquids and vape, juice, tip for use the keyword in the links to the products, but only do so if it flows naturally, don't stuff keywords. So now you're clear on creating categories and navigation labels. You know how to make your navigation page stand out to the search engines by using keywords. Let's cover one more form of navigation. Before we wrap up this lesson. Breadcrumb navigation. Remember the story of Hansel and Gretel? When they ventured into the woods, they dropped little pieces of bread, bread crumbs on the trail behind them as a way to follow them back to their home if they got lost. Now, despite how that didn't work out so well for them, if you read the fable, breadcrumbs work very well on websites. A breadcrumb is a text path usually located at the top of a page. Let's take a look at two of the main types of breadcrumbs used in e-commerce. This is a hierarchy, breadcrumb or a location breadcrumb. It shows you which categories and subcategories you're in. This is an attribute, bread crumb. It shows you the product you're looking at based on color, style or other attribute that can be selected. Look at this diagram to clearly see the difference between location, bread crumbs and attribute breadcrumbs. Why use breadcrumbs? Well, for one thing, Google loves him. Google often shows them on search results. Google looks at your breadcrumbs and sees another form of structure. In addition to your navigation labels and your product categories. Another benefit to breadcrumb navigation is that it lowers bounce rates. It's very unlikely that your users will come in via your homepage. Every part of your site is a way for people to get to your webpage. But what if the user doesn't find what they're looking for on that page, if there's no breadcrumb path, they might just go back to Google. But if they see how to easily find other options on your site by clicking back up the breadcrumb chain. Their whole experience will be different. To add breadcrumbs to your site, add them using the Yoast SEO or a breadcrumb plugin. You can add them by hand, but you'll need to use it what's known as structured data to ensure that Google understands that bread crumbs. Remember, you don't want your site to look like a forest that's impossible to navigate. So leave signposts in the form of product pages, product categories, strong URLs, navigation, labels, and breadcrumb navigation. Your website visitors will reward you for your reference. They'll buy your products. 7. Use images and captions that capture interest: Let's talk about your product presentation in your online store. So you've got your potential customer onto your website. They've chosen their category, the product category, and they've seen a product that captures their interests. How you present the product here is crucial. Presentation here, makes or breaks your sale. In this lesson, we're going to talk about visuals and product descriptions. These are the two factors that make up the presentation of your product page. We have seven tips for you to make sure your product presentation makes buyers want to click Add to Shopping Cart. Let's get started. Tip number 1. Use visuals for features, body copy for benefits. As a copywriter, you should know the difference between features and benefits, but I'll refresh your mind quickly. Features are surface statements about your product, like their specs, their design, their capabilities to features of this coat or that it is padded and it's waterproof. Benefits describe how these features benefit the consumer's life. The product description here says a luxurious coat insulated with water resistant down for total winter protection. So luxurious and insulated with water resistant down. Those are features. Total winter protection is the benefit. Reading on it says that this quote is the perfect winter solution for the hills or the high street. This is clearly another benefit showing where the consumer uses it and have benefits they'll get from using this coat. So back to our tip. Use visuals for features, body copy for benefits. This is a good rule of thumb for product presentation. It reminds us that pictures do a great job of illustrating features. This could be plain images of the product or images with added labels such as waterproof or secret hand warmer pocket. For example. The body copy is where you expand on these features and explain how these features benefit your customers lives if they buy the product. Tip number 2, Right Body Copy to describe the visuals. Unfortunately, shopping carts rarely have captions. So you can't rely on the picture alone to represent a product when it's in the shopping cart. So describe your visuals accurately in the body copy. Tailor this for different sizes and different colors so it's clear what your customer has in their cart. Checkout. This product page for Sam's beauty, for example, see the shopping cart and the top right-hand corner. Look at how descriptive the product description is. Upscale, 100% unprocessed, Brazilian virgin Remy, human hair, lace, front wig, natural wave, 18 inches. Then it has the color selection which is natural. This gives us all the information we need about the product. If we're referencing our shopping cart, a simple picture would not suffice. Now on to tip number three, right, your body copy with the visuals in front of you. When you're looking at the visuals, you see features you've missed. It might be something as simple as a contrasting color on a sweater or gold engraved detailing on a vape pen. These might not seem important, but these little details sway buyers from being positive about the product, but unsure whether to buy, to being eager customers. Make sure you have the visuals in front of you when you write your copy so you don't miss anything. Tip number 4. If you picture a feature, describe it and the benefit. If it's in the pictures, it should be in the text. Showcase the feature in the text and explain how it benefits the consumer. Here's a great example. Again from Sam to beauty. They sell lace front wigs. And here they go into detail about wig cap construction. If they just had the images here, this product description would fall short. Look at the image on the left hand side. As an example, the picture has a caption of stretch cap. This is a feature, but the text adds a whole lot more about the feature and how it benefits the customer. Pure stretch construction, that's a feature for the most comfortable fit ever. That's the benefit. Secure cat hugs the head any size and shape again, this is the benefit. Now for tip number 5, if you name a feature and benefit illustrated, this is tip number 4 only in reverse. If a feature and benefit is explained in the body copy, there should be a picture of it too. Let's look at an example. This is, let me take a deep breath. The Gillette, Venus silk expert intense pulse, light hair removal system, beauty addition, BD 5 000, 8. What I like here is the selection of images down the side that show various features, uses and benefits of the hair removal system. Not only are they describing the features and the benefits and the copy there, illustrating them in the images. This is a good practice. Now for tip number 6, right? Seo image alt tags. When you upload your images of your products, always include alt tags that describe the images. This has two benefits. It helps people who are vision impaired or who are using screen readers know what the images are. And secondly, Google loves alt tags because they tell Google what an image is about. Google can't index images only the descriptions of the images. When you upload your images to your media library, there will be a field for alternative text or alt text. In this section, put a description of what the image contains. Put target keywords here if possible. Tip number 7 allow buyers to zoom in and move around your images. Amazon is great for this. You hover over the image and it zooms in in a new window. Then you move your cursor around to various parts of the image and see them in more detail. This allows potential customers to see the tiny details that matter to them. Many e-commerce platforms have this feature. For example, 3D cart calls it Dynamic Zoom. Otherwise you can get it from plugins. For example, there's a jQuery Zoom plugin for Shopify. The key thing to remember about selling online is that the experience is different from shopping in a bricks-and-mortar store. In two vital ways. In a store, you can pick up the product, touch the product, hold the product, inspect the product online. You can't in a store. If you have a question, you can flag down a sales rep, I hope, and ask your question online. You can't, at least not very easily or quickly. This is my visuals are so vital to your success. When you're selling online, your potential customers need to see what they are buying. So the more images you can show your product, the better. Just remember that no image is ever worth a 1000 words. You need great copy to describe your visuals. So if you show a feature with a visual, describe the benefits with words. And if you describe a feature with words, illustrate it with a visual. You'll give your potential customers a better shopping experience and you'll sell more products. 8. Make an offer they can't refuse: Everyone loves a good offer, right? A bargain. I know I do. I imagined you do to your potential customers, or no difference. In this lesson, I'm going to talk about seven types of offers that you can give to your online customers and how to write them. Often, number one is free shipping. Shipping charges are super annoying. Have you ever gotten a great deal online only to find that when you go to checkout, Eat have been better off going to a store. Free shipping, especially on large items, is a huge incentive for your customer to click Add to Shopping Cart. Need proof. Check this out. This graph from E consultancy shows that free or discounted shipping offers a great deal of customer satisfaction. 74 percent of respondents say that free or discounted shipping is a great part of a satisfying online shopping experience. Unfortunately, if you're coy about offering the service, you'll miss out on the benefits of this conversion tool. Display the fact you are offering free shipping prominently. On your page like this. This company clearly explains their free shipping policy right above their logo, the bold font draws your eye and make sure you see it. Because the header stays the same, whichever page you're on, including on product pages like this one, you can see the message of free delivery wherever you are on the site, which is good. Offer number to buy one, get one free. Because this is likely to be a limited time offer unless you're crazy generous and have margin to throw away. You should really showed about this on your website. Don't do it this way. Lyme road is a fashion site. Here's a page all about their buy one, get one offer. Looks all good, right? Well, it would be good if this was the landing page you get to when you hit lime road.com, but it's not this is this is what you get. The buy one, get one free offer is nowhere to be seen. I stumbled across the former page by accident. I doubt that most visitors to the site even know it's there. So the promotion won't drive sales, which of course, is the whole point you're there to get sales. If you use buy one, get one free, make it prominent on your homepage. Now for offer number 3, 50 percent off. Obviously, this is the same as a buy one, get one free. It's going to be for a limited time, so plaster it all over your homepage for maximum effect. Walgreens. Does it right? All kinds of percentages off different products. The first thing you see when you land on their website. Now for offer number for store card discounts, this is along the lines of get one of our store credit cards and get 15 percent off your next purchase. Walmart are great at getting this right. This is what pops up if you go to Walmart money center. But even more impressive is their homepage. Not only do they have a banner touting this offer, they have two banners. The only disappointment is that the banner doesn't stick. When you go onto a product page. If you offer something like this, include it in the header throughout all your product pages for maximum visibility. Now, wanted to offer number 5, financing. Buy now pay later. That's an amazing incentive for customers to click the Add to Cart button. Amazon does this very well. Once you've added an item to your cart, a financing offer pops up. Your cart is eligible for six month special financing. You can include finance information on product pages or after the item is added to the cart. Now onto offer number six, order now, get it delivered by dot-dot-dot. One downside to online ordering is that it takes longer to get your item. Then if you just go out to the store and buy it. So including delivery dates on your product page can be an attractive incentive, an offer for them to buy. Now for our last offer, type number 7, discount codes. Everyone loves a discount code. Check out how Udemy incorporates this on their sales pages. Instead of waiting until the cart to show that there is a discount code available, they show them right there on the product pages. This prompts users to Google Udemy code's or Udemy discount codes to see if they can get a discount before they buy. If Udemy had left it until the shopping cart, they may have lost some customers who were looking for a bargain before they clicked Add to Cart. Now we're done with the offers. Let's take a look at guarantees. Guarantees are an effective way to tip customers into a purchase. After all, when we consider buying a product, especially buying a product online, we're concerned about risk. We're risking punching in our credit card details without having touched the product or seen it in person. That's why guarantees work really well in online stores. But to be effective, they have to be written well. Let's check out a couple of examples. I liked this example from Lands End, went on the product page, you click on the shipping and returns tab. The first thing you see is there guarantee, quote, guaranteed period. If you're not satisfied with any item, simply return it to us at anytime for an exchange or refund of its purchase price, unquote. This is simple and effective. I like the guaranteed period phrase that makes it sound like they're a hassle-free place to make returns to. If someone is on the fence about an item, they're undecided, they're more likely to go ahead and order when they see a guarantee like this, surely they might end up returning the product, but they might end up loving it and becoming a customer for life as well. If they didn't know that returns would be this easy, maybe they wouldn't have taken the chance in the first place. This guarantee reduce the risk of the purchase. When you write a guarantee statement. Make it reassuring. Focus on making sure the customer is satisfied with what they've bought. Sometimes websites use phrases like if it's not what you expected or if you're not satisfied for any reason in your guarantee. Be clear about how, when and why you offer refunds and accept returns. The main things you need to get across in the guarantee statement are that you care about the customers experience. You're not just out to get their money. The timeframe they have for returns or refunds is that within two weeks as it within a month, is it lifetime? How long does a guarantee last? Then there's the reason. Why will you accept a return and why won't you, if it's damaged if the color doesn't look the same as it did on their monitor, make this clear in your guarantee statement to avoid disgruntled customers. Later on. With all of these in place, you'll write an awesome guarantee statement to tip unsure buyers into willing customers. Place your guarantee near to your Add to Cart button for maximum effect. Which brings me to my final point. Great offers and great guarantees only work if your potential customers see them. So make sure your web designer is up-to-date on the latest research and best practices about website usability and navigation online, what you say is important, but sometimes where you say it is even more important. 9. Increase profit while helping your buyers: Have you ever walked into a McDonald's and ordered a hamburger? And the person behind the counter asks you, would you like fries with that? That was an upsell. Upsell is something that you offer to your customer when they're already in the process of buying something, you offer them an upgrade, or an accessory, or an extended warranty or something else. There are two benefits of upsells. You make more money from the transaction and you show that you care about the customers experience enough to suggest what else they might need. Do upsells badly though, and you look money-grubbing and end up annoying your customer. In this lesson, we'll look at upsells and how to present them for maximum effect when you are selling online. Checkout. This page from funky pigeon.com, It's a British greeting cards and gifts website. Here I've just chosen and personalized a birthday card. Before I move on to enter my card and e-mail address and address, it asks me to add a gift to my order. I can add up to three gifts to be sent with my order, one gift per category below, I can order a gift, some chocolates or candy, and a gift card. Look at the items along the top row. As an example, the teddy bear is 999. Those Montezuma chocolates are 1999 and that Marks and Spencer's gift card is 20. If I buy all three, I spent a whopping 4998 extra considering I only came to order a card for less than three, buying those extra things is significant. This page works for three reasons. The gifts that they present, our typical gifts you buy for pretty much anyone. They're not particularly quirky or specific. Secondly, they offer a good amount of choice. If you scroll down, you'll see the offer six choices on the page itself. This is enough for it not to be overwhelming as an upsell. But at the title of each category there's a C More button. This is great if you want to add a gift, but can't find what you want among the six options that they present. The third reason that this works well is how clearly and simply it's presented and long before you reach the payment screen. If it was done on the payment screen, it would look like more of a last effort to grab your money, but done like this, they're helping you make your friend or loved ones birthday Special. Let's look at another common type of upsell, the protection plan. Amazon offers protection plans on many of the products itself. I like the way they provide two options and present them just above the Add to Cart button. If you are buying a laptop, these offers make you pause and think, do I need a protection plan? Three years action and protection. It says, this immediately gets you thinking about accidents you could have with your laptop or accidents you've had in the past. With laptops. The prominence of its position highlights its importance. I expect this is an effective upsell for Amazon. If you sell electronic products or expensive products, highlight any protection plans you offer as prominently as you can. If you don't sell greeting cards or expensive electronics, don't worry, there are plenty of other types of upsells out there. Let's look at a couple more. First, let's checkout sites that draw you in with a low priced offer, then offer product levels as an up. So this is the join page of Elegant Themes. Advertising tells you of an $89 per year feet. But when you get to the joint page, you're presented with an upsell often you can get lifetime access for 249. Below each option they offer a comparison of what you get with each package. Let's look at another example of the same concept. Here's the ad from Virgin Media. Here they promote an online exclusive of five pounds a month for nine months, read the headline, better than half price fiber optic broadband with unlimited downloads for unlimited entertainment, this will pull plenty of people in five pounds, around $7 for a month's worth of Internet. Not bad. But this is their web page. You clearly see the five-pound option on the left, but the next option over is only 10 pounds. As you scroll down the table, you see that you get 60 TV channels for just an extra five pounds a month. That's a pretty Attractive upsell, but they haven't stopped there. On this page. They upsell three packages with different levels of features. But this doesn't even feel like an upsell. Having so many options available allows the customer to choose the package that is right for them. This works well. Let's look at another example. Let's pretend for a moment that we are going to Marrakech. Not too painful to imagine, right? I'm hitting Booking.com. The lebron, the rose looks nice. That pool looks tempting and just a $125 per night and that's not bad. When we click into the page and look at our options, we see the a $125 option is there? Absolutely. But so are plenty of other options for a $138, just $13 more, we get breakfast or 175. This $50 more than the original price. We get both breakfast and dinner included. These are attractive upsells. What's more? If we keep scrolling? There's yet more. Upsells. Booking.com shows us other room types, like a double room with a sofa bed. Again, none of these look like sneaky upsells trying to squeeze extra money out of you rather, their options to help you, the customer, choose the experience and the product that you want. Now let's look at some different upsell packages from various retailers. Let's say I'm buying an iPad after I've chosen my color, storage amount, Wi-Fi connectivity, and so on. If I want an additional protection plan, I'm taken to this page. In this instance, the upgrade engraving is free, but it's a great example of an effective upsell. This huge heading, would you like to add free engraving leaves us in no doubt about what this page is about. Having the box to type in your personalization right below the headline is also very effective. It makes the experience seamless. Also having a message under the headline and clearly showing us how to skip this step by clicking on a clear add to bag button at the top is also good practice. It means we don't feel trapped into including an option in our purchase that we don't want. You can use this same idea with a paid addition to a product in your online store, give people a chance to opt out easily. If you use Shopify, you can easily add the option to engrave or monogram a product that you sell or just about any other up-sell you want to use to customize product. Instead of creating variants of the product you're selling, you can add line item properties. Line item properties are custom form fields. You add to the product page. Add a line item property to let customers enter text for engraving. For example. Alternatively, use a product customization app from the Shopify App Store to easily upsell page customizations to your products. Think about the kinds of up-sell products or features you could offer on your products. For example, if you sell mattresses, offer mattress protectors, you can think outside the box too. If you sell stoves, you can, of course, offer protection, but you can also offer a pan set whenever you do present the offer in a prominent place, preferably long before the payment page. You want your customers to still be thinking about what they want and how to enhance their own experience. Catch them before they get their credit card out and start to think more about the expense that they're about to make. If there's one tip I want you to take away from this. It's that upsells should always enhance your customers experience. After all, your customers are the people who pay your bills, right? 10. Write short product descriptions that convert: Imagine that you've got a potential customer on your product page, on your website. You've got your images ready. You've got your Add to Cart button there. Now your job is to sway your customer with copy. Your product description can make or break your sale is one of the most important things on your website. So let's have a look at how you can wow your customers with words and get them excited to purchase your product. Tip number one, rank your features and benefits. First, make a list of all your features and all your benefits. Features are the characteristics. Product benefits are how those features help your customers. For example, a feature could be waterproofing on a coats. The benefit is that you can wear the coat all your round even when it rains or snows. Once you have your features and benefits listed, put them in order of importance to your customers. Look at this chair from ikea. On the right-hand side, in the highlighted area, you can see a feature and a benefit. You sit comfortably. That's a benefit. Since the chair is adjustable in height, that's a feature. This is obviously the most important feature and benefit combo because it's the only one mentioned in this section of the page. When you scroll down, there's a whole lot more that you learn about this product. Let's look at the highlighted one here. Complies with California TB 177 2013 flammability requirements. Now that's not an exciting feature. It's a feature and it should be mentioned, but it's ranked lower on the page than comfort and adjustability of the chair. For good reasons, customers just don't care as much about that compliance. Once you've compiled a list of your features and your benefits and rank them in order of importance. We move on to tip number two, alternate between features and benefits. The last thing anyone wants to read is a dry bulleted list of features, features, features, and then along gushing paragraph of how this product is going to improve their lives. The bulleted features list will feel boring and it will be boring and the benefits paragraph will feel way over the top. But when you intertwine the features and benefits and you mix them up, a wonderful thing happens. The features no longer sound boring and irrelevant. And the benefits no longer sound like fluff. They're backed up by the hard facts of the features. This is an excellent example of weaving in features and benefits. They've also included multiple benefits per feature, which is an excellent practice. This is a magnetic building set. Let's look at how they've done this so well. As the pages long, I've highlighted just one section for us to study the English is not quite correct. I think this is a Chinese product, but the structure of the product description is excellent. No more mess in your kid's room. That's a benefit. Comes with a storage box. That's a feature. Let your kid play qua quadro, exciting magnetic building block set and put them in a storage box after playtime, you get clean kids room. That's a benefit. Your kid doesn't lose parts, that's a benefit. You see how they've identified two benefits of having a storage box. And they've interwoven the features with the benefits. This is a good example. Now for our next tip, tip number 3, bury the tech. Unless it's hot right now. Just like the Ikea chair that meets the California Fire Code, your products are likely to have a lot of technical specs, specifications. But unless those specs are hot right now or important to the user, bury them. I mean, put them lower down on your page, or preferably put them last or put them behind a tab. Depending on the product, this will look different. For example, the dimensions of a large corner desk are important. You need to know, those need to know if it's going to fit in your office. So in this product description, the dimensions are included in the top portion of the Amazon description is that of buried further down the page. It's important. So it's mentioned first. On the other hand, the shelf dimensions are really not as important. So they're buried in the longer product description only to be found if you scroll down tip number 4, paint a picture and put your customer in it. The customer is already trying to imagine what their life will be like with this product. So do them a favor, put them at the center of the action. This is a product description for a stroller. In all honesty, it's a bit too techie for my taste. But the underlined part is what I like, allowing your child to recline comfortably. When you hear that you immediately have an image of a child reclining in the stroller. And if you're a parent, it's probably your child that you're imagining. This is great because it makes the consumer fit the product into a mental image of their lives. If the benefits they picture are strong enough, this will convince them to buy. Tip number 5. Meet customer concerns. Head on. Customers have questions they want answers to before they buy an item. Amazon knows this really well. And that's why they created the question and answer section for every product. This is great, but it's better when you preempt those questions and answer them before the customer even gets a chance to ask. Here's some examples that people have about products that they want answers to before they buy. Are the crystals. Swarovski, is this compatible with Australian DVD players? If I can't make the coaching call, Will there be a recorded version? I can listen to afterward? Some customers have questions about the buying process. Can I return it? If I don't like, will it be here before Tuesday? What if the item isn't as described on the website? The questions are endless. So first, think of as many questions as you can. Look up items like yours on Amazon and see what people are asking questions about. Then answer those questions and include them in your product descriptions. Your answers could be the difference between a customer deciding to buy your product or clicking the back button and going to a competitor. Now for our final tip, superlatives are the best ever heard of good, better, best. Which of these sounds like the item you would most want to buy? This is a good car, this is a better car. This is the best car. The last one. Of course, we all want the best. So we've superlatives into your copy to make an impression on your reader. Superlatives include largest, smallest, fastest, cheapest. But always make sure that your superlatives are true. Don't con your customers also provide proof. If you say that you have the fastest computer to load, then quantify that, tell people loads in three seconds as opposed to 10 seconds. For example, let's compare the product page for the iPad Pro with the one for the Galaxy Tab S3, they both have strong superlatives. Apple is certainly not shy about shouting out their superlative, the world's most advanced display. But just in case you are going to, you can scroll down on that page and read why Apple has the most advanced display in the world. They pack this paragraph with features and benefits. The screen is brighter, it's less reflective, it's more responsive. They explain why it's the best. They prove why it's the best. Let's see how Samsung compares with their copy. This is the only part of the page where they use a superlative. It's the first. And I like how they do it charged fast for less downtime. The tab S3 is the first tablet to support fast charging with up to 12 hours of video playback time for a less downtime. Then they have the figures below. I like how they back up their superlative with features and benefits. We've come to the end of our sick tips on how to write awesome short product pages. Put these six tips into practice. The next time you write a short description of a product that you're selling online. And remember, plenty of your potential customers will read your short product description before they read anything else. So if you want to boost your sales, boost the effectiveness of your short descriptions. 11. Write long product descriptions that wow: Sometimes the short description of a product isn't enough to get your customer to click the Add to Cart button. Sometimes it is, but other times customers need more information to make a decision. This is especially relevant if they're comparing your product with another one. At a competing market. They want to see technical specifications plus the benefits and features they can expect if your product is the one they choose to buy. This is where long product descriptions come in. These are sometimes called product details and can be found on the product page further down from the short description. Sometimes you include a long product description as the main description on the page. And other times your product details are found on a tab below the main description, something like this. Let's run through our five top tips to follow to ace your long product descriptions. Tip number one, keep your sentences short and simple. This is an example of what not to do. Now let me take a deep breath before I start. Our classmate. Tech pack is not only super durable and comfortable to carry, but it's also designed to keep their laptop or tablet safe and secure since we all know they can play rough and we spend a lot on those expensive electronics, unquote. That's 44 words. It's far too many. This product description for a Minnie Mouse luggage set is much better. Give your fashion loving girl, this adorable Minnie Mouse three-piece luggage set. That's just 13 words. She will be traveling in style with all her necessities with her. That's just 12 words and it's still convincing. You also want to avoid convoluted sentence structures. Here's an example from Lands End. Let's read the start of the product description. The squirrel system provides you with the opportunity to customize your protection and warmth. That sounds vague. I don't feel clear on what I'm getting after reading that. Choose your level of weather protection would have been much easier to understand. Now for tip number 2, breakup long copy with subheads. If you have a long product page, you need subheads. Long product pages are common for expensive products. And for products were a few simple product photos and a little bit of body copy isn't enough. Subheads are subheadings, break up the material and make it easier to digest. Pictures can also be used to break up long copy. Gala Darling is selling an online course called the radical self-love boot camp. Here's the beginning of the long product description. And I mean, long. She breaks it up with sections such as learn more, what's included, and frequently asked questions. If you need to write a super long product description to showcase all the features and benefits of what you have to offer. Use Subtitles and sections like these. They work wonders to keep your reader's attention. Now let's move on to tip number 3. Put your buyer in your copy. This means you have to bring the product to life. Don't talk about it like it's a product on a shelf or on a hanger. Talk about it like your customer is already using it and enjoying it in their lives today. Here's an example of how not to do this. This is from the long product description for the Galaxy Tab S3. Do more by simply attaching the magnetic keyboard to the tab S3, the optimized layout and increased space between keys helps to eliminate errors for an enhanced experience on a tablet. The only thing they've said about the customer is do more, which doesn't sound very inspiring. Does it? Couldn't have been much better. Let's say typing on a tablet is difficult. So attached the magnetic keyboard to the S3, it has more space between the keys to, so you find it easier to type and you make fewer errors. That makes me picture snapping the keyboard on and typing away happily. The existing description does not. It just sounds like headache inducing jargon. Now for tip number 4, tell a story. This is similar to tip three, but takes your reader to a whole new level. Let's check out an example first. This is a page from little woods and selling a Lego set based on the Batman movie. Let's read the copy in the product description. Crews in flight mode with Batman and Robin at the controls of the powerful bat wing. But watch out. Harley Quinn is shooting her rapid-fire canon and trying to take you down, fire the spring loaded shooters and disk shooters, then flip the wings into lending mode and take the battle to the city streets, released the car from the back of the bat wing and drive after Harley, beware of her hammer attacks and strike back with Batman's battering. You must capture this supervillain before she causes even more chaos. Exclamation mark, isn't that great? Since it's a toy, I think it makes sense to describe it in such a playful way. All of the features of the toys are listed within this description and we all know what the benefit is. Lots and lots of fun for kids. If you have a product that provides a particular experience or if your brand is quirky, then tell a story when you're describing your product. Now for our last tip, number 5, right? Unique descriptions. Every product description you write has to be unique. You might think it's a great idea to go to the manufacturer's website and copy the description that they supply for the product and paste it into your website. But this will have disastrous consequences for your sales. Taking a description from Amazon or a description from another website, or description from anywhere else except your own head is courting disaster. This is because search engines such as Google look for sites that have unique content. If you use content from other sites, the search engines will penalize you and you won't show up on search results, at least not where you want to. Now, you can look at other websites for inspiration, but I firmly advise you to shut down the window of that website before you write your own copy, you can maybe read two or three descriptions for your product if it's sold elsewhere, get ideas for your own product descriptions, but don't use the same sentences. Don't use the same structure or even the same phrases. Unless you want to drop out of Google search results, which I'm sure you don't want to do. Now you've got these top five tips for writing product descriptions. You can wow your readers and persuade them to hit the buy. Now button. 12. Six Lessons from Amazon on Writing Short Product Descriptions: One of your primary jobs when writing e commerce copy is communicating the essence of a product as quickly as possible. Your enemy is the clock. After all, your copy is going to appear on the product page of a shopping cart, and your reader is going to click away from your product page within seconds if you fail to grab their attention and maintain their interest. This means you must master the art of writing in staccato. Staccato, of course, is a musical term for music performed with each note sharply detached or separated from the other notes. The place where you practice this art of staccato is in the short description. On most shopping carts, this short description is placed near the top of the page. This product page on Amazon, for example, displays the short description to the right of the product image and beneath the product title or headline. If you want to master e commerce copywriting, master this short description. Let's look at some best practices using this product page as our teacher. Best Practice, number one, is to write in bullets. Take the features and benefits of your product and arrange them in a bulleted list. Bulleted lists are easier on the eye and easier to read than the same information consolidated into a solid block of copy or even broken up into a bunch of paragraphs. Number two, rank your bullets from important to at important, most important at the top, least important at the bottom. In this short description, notice the features at the top of the list. A new and Rings best battery powered doorbell camera. Now look at the bottom and see that the quick release battery and Alexa functionality are ranked last. This is because these features are common for all of Rings doorbell cameras. There's nothing special about them, so they belong at the bottom of the list. Number three, name the feature, then describe the benefit or vice versa. Here, for instance, the copywriter names the product feature head to toe view and then describes the benefit. Head to toe HD plus video in 15 36 P gives you an expanded field of view so you can see more of who's at your front door. There you see it. The camera is 15 36 P. That's the technical spec that means the camera is tall and thin to give you an expanded field of view. But what's the benefit? Well, the writer tells you, you can see more of who's at your front door. Now, you and I would improve this copy, wouldn't we? First of all, we'd remove the can in you can see more of who's at your front door. We would simply state more emphatically and directly, you see more of who's at your front door. The other change we'd make is to put this benefit at the start of the copy instead of at the end, like this. Head to toe view, see more of who's at your front door with head to toe HD plus video in 15 36 P for an expanded field of view. Number four, write for skimmers. Don't write your bullets as sentences with a subject verb and noun. The key here is to be concise. You must capture the feature or the benefit in only a few words, head to toe view, three D motion detection. Low light sight, person and package alerts. And even better way to make these standout is to render them in all caps like this. They are much easier to see at a glance and much easier to scan from top to bottom. The fifth best practice to use when writing short product descriptions is to put your buyer in your copy and to make them an active user of the product already. Check out person and package alerts, for example. Notice that the writer doesn't say person and package alerts, tell you when a package is delivered. Why not? Because that would put the focus on the product feature, not on the buyer. Instead, the writer says, know when a package is delivered with package alerts. The copy puts the reader, the potential customer in the position of already using the product and already benefiting from this feature. The sixth and final best practice for writing effective short product descriptions is to use all of the space you are given. On Amazon, sellers are given five bullet points, and vendors, that's brands are given ten. But you see that this vendor has used only eight bullets out of the ten. That's a big mistake. In advertising all other things being equal, the more you tell the more you sell. Make the most of the real estate that the shopping cart gives you. Tell more and you'll sell more. This brings up a rather valid point. If you want to improve your e commerce copywriting, go online and visit the shopping carts of the kinds of brands that you want to write copy for. Study their copy. Discover the copywriting tips, tricks, and tactics that they use, then go and do likewise.